Great Performers features The Sixteen next month at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola.

The idea of voices lifted in song, offering spiritual and philosophical refreshment, is the
foundation of Lincoln Center's Music of the Spirit series. And on the evening of April 6, conductor
Harry Christophers and The Sixteen‹the choir he founded 26 years ago‹will offer an Eastertide
program of music by three distinguished English composers spanning more than five centuries.

"The year 2005 is an important one for Thomas Tallis and Michael Tippett,"
says Christophers. "It is the 500th anniversary of the death of Tallis, a true icon of Renaissance
music. I think, with William Byrd, he was really the finest of the English Renaissance composers.
And Tippett, who was born 100 years ago, was one of the first people to program a lot of Renaissance
repertoire. I think people forget he was also a conductor. A bit like me, actually, he really championed
the music of the Renaissance, as well as of the Baroque and the 20th century."

Aesthetic, as well as historical, connections are easily found between
Renaissance polyphony and the choral works of the modern age. Christophers points out that the
best 20th-century choral composers‹including Poulenc and Britten‹looked directly to the
16th and 17th centuries for inspiration both technical and expressive. "Certainly there should
be no restraint on Renaissance music," says Christophers. "We inject very much passion into it.
People can hear us on recording as much as they like, but I often say that to hear The Sixteen live in
performance is a completely different kettle of fish."

The April 6 program will conclude with John Tavener's "Song for Athena,"
which was heard at Princess Diana's funeral in 1997. "This really brought public attention to Tavener,"
says Christophers. "His music may not have the compositional expertise of Tallis or Tippett. But
Tavener has something else to give. There is something about his music that epitomizes people's
concern for wanting peace in their lives. I have sort of crowned this program with his music. It has
a spiritual, calming quality that is very important. And a choral program needs contrast, always."

Tippett was honored in January throughout the U.K. with centenary performances
of his works. He also came in for some carping from the on-line magazine La Scena, which accused
him of mediocrity and amateurism. Christophers begs to differ. "As a composer, Tippett is very
much a true voice," he declares. "He took a lot of knockings earlier in the century for his pacifist
sentiment. And in his later operas, he chose to write his own librettos, which really became a sort
of noose around his neck. But having said that, his early operas are very much here to stay. They are
performed around the world. His orchestral music is fascinating. It is a great pity he did not write
more unaccompanied choral music. Today we are back to a lot of composers placing orchestral music
first. But the better ones are saying, 'Look, I mustn't forget the human voice. Because it's important.'"

The Sixteen will perform five spirituals from Tippett's acclaimed
1941 oratorio A Child of Our Time. Christophers has a deep background with these works,
which he first performed in the 1960s as a boy chorister at Canterbury Cathedral under the tutelage
of the remarkable Allan Wickes.

"He was a real extrovert," recalls Christophers, "a one-off. Wickes
was not your archetypal organist-choirmaster. People thought of us as the 'angels' of the cathedral.
But outside on the playground, we were far from it! One thing Wickes taught me was never to give up
on a performance. It could be going bloody awfully. And he would just turn on a piece of magic. You
would leave thinking, 'Boy, that was all right!' And the audience would think so, too. He taught
us to savor, to really enjoy, singing."

Of the three composers represented on the April 6 program, whose music
gave The Sixteen the most trouble? "I suppose the Tippett was the hardest," Christophers reveals.
"Any Renaissance music is in our blood. Especially the English and Iberian repertoires. In Renaissance
music, you phrase in an arch, tapering away at the end of a phrase. But in Tippett's spiritual arrangements,
you need to have much more line. You need to sing to the end of the phrase, you need to be up on the nature
of the words, and you need quite a little freedom. Tippett's arrangements are quite complex. But
I don't think he ever gets in the way of the very simple message."

Christophers returns repeatedly to the link between the architecture
and the music of the Renaissance period. "The music," he continues, "is very much based on architectural
principles, and the whole idea of the phrase as the arch of a building: a cathedral abbey, or perhaps
the proscenium of a theater. That shape is always present in the music of the period. It is very galling
to hear a group doing this repertoire with no understanding of how the music is shaped. The ebb and
flow must be there in the tempo as well. The basic tempo was the tempo of the heartbeat. And of course
the heartbeat gets faster as the music gets more impassioned, or slower to express a more penitential
feeling."

What sort of place does The Sixteen occupy in the continuum of English
choral music? Christophers' response is surprising. "I sort of fight against the English choral
tradition," he admits. "It is wonderful in its precision, its tuning, attention to detail. But
one thing I cannot stand is overenunciating consonants. All the cathedral choirs do it. I have heard
the word 'Egypt' pronounced with four syllables. I really have this bee in my bonnet that we should
sing the way we speak. The essential thing, the secret, is for a choir to learn where the music is headed.

"The great thing about singing is the freedom it gives you. Too many musicians
look for precision and accuracy first, and the music ends up taking second place. That is wrong to
me, although I am very much in the minority. We inject a big amount of emotion into whatever we do.
When the ensemble breathes together, feels together, and engages with the music and with one another,
the problems of tuning and ensemble mostly disappear. And I think, in The Sixteen, we have proved
this approach to be right."

Marcia Young is a New York-based music journalist and for the classical channels of Sirius Satellite Radio.